Traditional forms of top-down government are being challenged by the growing complexity and fragmentation of social and political life and the need to mobilize and activate the knowledge, ideas, and resources of private stakeholders.

In response to this important challenge there has been a persistent proliferation of interactive forms of public governance that bring together a plethora of public and private actors in collaborative policy arenas.

This book explores how these new forms of interactive governance are working in practice and analyses their role and impact on public policy making in different policy areas and in different countries. The need for facilitating, managing and giving direction to interactive policy arenas is also addressed through empirical analyses of different forms of metagovernance that aim to govern interactive forms of governance without reverting to traditional forms of hierarchical command and control. Finally, the normative implications of interactive policy making are assessed through studies of the democratic problems and merits associated with interactive policy making.